


the pain from an old wound

by delia-pavorum (literaryminded)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: -Ish, Because He's Ben Here, Canon - Movie, Canon Compliant, Character Perspective: Kylo Ren, F/M, Hand Touch, Introspection, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, POV Ben Solo, POV Kylo Ren, POV Male Character, The Hand Scene in TLJ, it's canon, so does Rey, who are we kidding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 16:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14140170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryminded/pseuds/delia-pavorum
Summary: “It isn’t too late.”He wants to believe it. For the first time in what feels like forever, he is Ben Solo again, supplicant to the idea of his own redemption. Making a fervent wish like the thousands before it that the darkness will subside once and for all, retract its jagged and insidious claws, so he can finally go forth and mend the ruptures in his spirit. Become whole again.The Force Bond scene in the hut on Ahch-To, when Rey and Ben touch hands for the first time, told from Ben’s perspective.





	the pain from an old wound

_"In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’_  
_It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone..._  
_It takes us to a place where we ache to go again..._  
_It lets us travel the way a child travels –_  
_around and around, and back home again,_  
_to a place_  
_where we know_  
_we are loved.”_

* * *

He almost misses it when it happens for the fourth time.

Kylo Ren strides down one of the endless corridors of the Finalizer, his boots thudding purposefully with each step he takes. His mind is in perpetual motion: thinking ahead to the plans for the day, thinking back to things that have already occurred, gathering and discarding the tendrils of emotions and thoughts constantly swirling around him. Although he feels the change – a popping in his ears; the absence of true silence while at the same time a dampening of all else – he is distracted, agitated with other matters, other thoughts. He is dangerously close to ignoring it completely. Unintentionally, since his fascination with the connection – _yes only the connection_ – is often too strong to ignore, but overlooking it nonetheless. He simply has too much to do, too much to oversee, too much to plan... 

But that’s when he feels it.

A sharp ache, in his chest. The biting melancholy of regret, united with a faint, duller undertone of pain that seeps into his bones. It’s reminiscent of nostalgia, but sharper: the phantom loss of an experience he's never had, mixed with a longing he's always felt. He pauses, a brief hiccup in his otherwise determined stride, and rubs vaguely at the area - almost willing to dismiss it as a fleeting error in his body, an oversight that the inner workings of his being should have known better than to make - when suddenly he realizes. This feeling is not his at all. While he may be experiencing it, it has not originated from him nor does it belong to him alone.

He stops abruptly. Looks around surreptitiously.

 _Where is she?_  

He half expects her to appear in front of him with an outdated blaster or her makeshift staff, snarling in that feral way she has, wind-blown and soaking wet from the abysmal weather of whatever maker-forsaken rock of a planet she’s cohabiting with his uncle. He waits a beat. And another. The pain in his chest has intensified and he feels a burning behind his eyes, a lump in the back of his throat. His chest seizes with distress and this time he’s unsure if it’s still her reaction or if it’s his own.

Another furtive glance reveals he is currently alone; not just in the Force, but physically as well. He senses the presence of others nearby, Stormtroopers most likely, but for this moment he stands, a solitary figure in a vast corridor of metal and light.

 _Where_ is _she?_

And then he hears it. A wet sound – faint, but clear in its significance. The burning in his eyes intensifies. He knows if he were to try to speak, no sound would come out past the constriction of his throat.

Through his investigation, which has grown more desperate now that he knows there is no one to witness his unusual behaviour, he spies an open door nearby leading to a seemingly unoccupied room. He enters the room in two or three strides and comes to a stuttering halt.

 _Rey_.

She’s sitting, although the details of where, exactly, are not clear. There’s a thin blanket of questionable material wrapped haphazardly over her shoulders. Sure enough, her hair and clothing are wet and he senses more than sees the faint shudders that run through her body as a reaction to the dampness seeping through.

She’s also crying. Softly, silently.

Kylo lowers himself into the nearest chair, eyes glued to her form, not fully comprehending what his body is doing as his legs fold to accommodate his actions. He swallows hard.

 _Rey_.

She looks up abruptly, although her tear-stained face doesn’t register surprise at seeing him. Resignation, perhaps. And, possibly...relief?

“What happened?” Kylo finds his voice, finally, but it sounds foreign even to his own ears. Rusty. Neglected.

She shakes her head slowly as a wave of tears pours forth anew. She struggles for only a moment and he can see, as well as feel, exactly when she mentally gathers the strands of her courage, her dignity. Her back straightens and her mind mimics the action.

“I tried to do what you said,” she says, after a few more beats of silence.

He stays silent, waiting for her to continue. His eyes feel cemented to her face and, somewhere deep down, he knows there is no power in the galaxy strong enough to break his gaze from her. The impression of rain hitting a rocky surface knocks at the back of his skull.

“To ‘let the past die’”, she clarifies, finally, although he always understood what she meant. “But in order to do that, I had to… I needed to see…” Her voice breaks off and she shakes her head, disdain evident. He realizes it’s directed inwardly, at her own weakness. “I needed to see if I could find answers. And I knew where I had to go to find them.”

She explains to him, briefly, about the well in the rock by the thrashing ocean that leads to a cave. He sees it in her mind’s eye as she speaks, feels the damp coolness, the vague sense of claustrophobia, the stale air. He’s always hated small spaces; he can’t help but convey that to her as her mind takes him through her journey deeper in the darkness.

She must sense it, his unease, the crawling of his skin translated onto her own, because she says wonderingly, almost in agreement: “I should have felt trapped, or panicked, but I didn’t.”

Still, he doesn’t speak. How can he admit to her that she correctly sensed his weakness? This flaw in his person that makes him more human than monster? Better she sees him for what he really is than to ascribe humanity where it no longer belongs.

 She continues, “This didn’t go on forever, I knew it was leading somewhere. And that at the end, it would show me what I came to see.”

He gets the sense of a journey; not a long walk, but a voyage nonetheless. His heart is thundering in his chest and he know it’s an echo of how she felt in that moment, how she feels now recalling it. Although she has stopped speaking, her voice still resonates through the transoms of his mind.

_“Let me see them. My parents. Please.”_

He has a vision. A reflective surface in front of him, a wall of rock, but with a hazy depth beyond his reach. A hand, his hand – no, clearly not his, _hers_ – poised on the surface, fingertips attempting to embed themselves into the stone. He sees two images, people, and his breath catches in unison with hers, as though he was there when she saw it, as though they saw it together.

The two figures slowly merge into one. His heart sinks; he feels like he knows where this is leading. The tears dripping from her face in her current manifestation, the one protectively huddled under that thin blanket right in front of him – so close and yet lightyears, galaxies, away – tells him that his suspicions are true. He tries to focus on the vision, to see what she was meant to see, perhaps something she may have missed…

The transformation of two into one is complete and he can almost make out a face, one whose outline is familiar in a nebulous way, like a dream that’s already been forgotten or a memory that was buried. Before he can place the image, the fog clears and it unmistakeably becomes a face he knows.

Her face.

He drops to his knees in devastation.

Of course he doesn’t. He stays seated in his chair. But the ache in his shins belies a pain that does exist, somewhere, between the two of them. It matches the ache in their hearts. He remains silent, reverent of her sorrow and her grief.

After a time, either a moment or an eternity, she speaks: “I thought I’d find answers here.” Her tone holds a faint note of wonder, as if she herself cannot believe the depths of her own miscalculation. “I was wrong.” A beat. “I’d never felt so alone.” Self-deprecation creeps into her tone near the end. And then, finally, resignation.

 _Alone_.

A state she is all too familiar with. The state she has always been and always will be. He feels this resignation in the marrow of his bones and he knows that’s where it exists in her, too. It is a part of her that has always existed and will continue to exist in her place when she’s gone. Loneliness is her one constant, the characteristic that defines her. Her interminable companion.

Kylo rebels against these thoughts and the feelings that leach into his head, his lungs, his heart. The heart that, even now, thumps a rapid, irregular beat beneath his chest. The burning in his eyes has intensified and he watches as tears drip steadily from her eyes and fall ceaselessly off her cheeks, her jaw, one after the other. Twin tracks mark his face, a reflection of hers.

 _No._ She is not alone. There is another.

He speaks: “You’re not alone.” He wants to say more, but the words choke him.

The erratic rhythm in his chest comes to an abrupt halt as her eyes finally, _finally_ meet his dead-on. In those eyes he sees wonder, relief, and a brief glimmer of hope. He feels for the first time the warmth of a fire that he now sees reflected in her warm gaze. When she responds, it causes his poor, tormented heart to stutter back to life.

“Neither are you.”

The words are a balm, traveling through the force and spreading over his beleaguered soul. They are an embrace, said in a manner that is meant to reassure and to soothe. He absorbs them into his being, allows them to fill long-forgotten and dusty cracks and to pacify snarling voices and snapping teeth.

A call comes faintly from the distance, but Kylo barely pays it any heed. His focus is on her, only on her, and the next words that are coming from her lips.  

“It isn’t too late.”

He wants to believe it. For the first time in what feels like forever, he is Ben Solo again, supplicant to the idea of his own redemption. Making a fervent wish like the thousands before it that the darkness will subside once and for all, retract its jagged and insidious claws, so he can finally go forth and mend the ruptures in his spirit. Become whole again.

He doesn’t want to break eye contact, but he senses movement coming from underneath her blanket. He glances down and sees her small hand slowly lifting. Coming forward. He feels an involuntary spasm, a twitch under his left eye, the only external proof that he is far from unmoved.

 _Could it be…? Was it even_ possible?

For all his reserve, the cool remote side of his unbalanced nature, he can't pretend that he hasn’t already considered this. After the initial shock of being connected in this way, across the stars yet right before each other’s eyes, his next immediate thought involved the logistics of what would happen were he to place his hands on her. To feel the coarse material of her vest, or to touch the wraps around her arms, or to thread his fingers through the loose strands of her hair (in his contemplations, her hair is down for reasons he doesn’t wish to explore or explain).

Her hand comes forward more boldly, sure and steady. He hears the echo of her heartbeat in his ears, feels it in tune with his own thumping pulse. Her brows are heavy over her eyes. He knows she can hardly believe she is doing this, but as with everything else she does, her curiosity, her sense of wonder, and her fearlessness propel her forward.

His mind is now blank, his sole focus on those strong, yet delicate fingers, attached to a hand that he knows will be completely dwarfed by his own in size if not in power. He sees years of hardship in that small hand. Toil and tribulations that fostered strength and courage, allowing it to now be an unwavering presence, extended out to the mighty Kylo Ren (or resurrecting the shattered remnants of Ben Solo).

He reaches swiftly to remove his glove, gripping the tips of its fingers and tearing it off at a stuttering pace. The whole time he doesn’t – can’t – break eye contact. They breathe in unison, deep, rapid, and in time with their thumping hearts.

He knows his hand is trembling; he can’t help the frenetic energy that is coursing through his veins, blurring his vision, making his breath shudder with each intake and exhale.

Her hand isn’t. It is steady in his vision and in the Force. An anchor.

He overreaches for a brief moment, moving to grasp her palm, wrap his larger palm around her thumb, hand, and wrist, pull her bodily towards him. However, the thought of attempting to hold her thusly and having his hand simply glide through her flesh, a reminder of the transient nature of this interaction, a reminder that she _is not actually here_ —

He pulls back at the last second, a cowardly act, but one to preserve the armour around his heart. They will start small. They will start, not with a grasp, but with a simple touch. Her fingertips move towards his own in incremental measures. The speed of his breath increases and he hears her shaky exhales overtop his own. Closer, closer, until finally, _finally_ —

Contact.

The Force proclaims its assent with a deafening boom, a rattle of thunder that shakes the room they both occupy — either a crude hut on a rocky planet or the sterile, empty room of a Star Destroyer, or both or neither. 

Every single hair on Kylo Ren’s body individuates, standing on end. The connection manifests as an electrical charge, zinging through his body and his bones, sending blood to all his extremities – _all_ his extremities, a pulsing need, the reawakening of a resting beast – pumping a thriving life force into his very being. Images cycle through his vision and in his mind, moving at a rapid pace. _Memories_. He is seeing her memories. He is seeing her truth. He is seeing her—he sees her—

_Kriff._

Across from him, she is similarly moved. Although still trained on him, her eyes have lost their focus and he knows she, too, is seeing a similar movement of thoughts, feelings, and images before her. Related to him. He wonders what she sees. What she now knows.

To him, one thing has become patently, unmistakeably clear.

The world around them erupts suddenly, an explosion of sound and movement, a complete uproar in the Force. They both turn to the source of wrathful energy emanating towards them. Rey withdraws her hand quickly as though she’s been burned; still an attentive pupil, still – even subconsciously – seeking the approval of her master. Kylo’s hand remains outstretched, defiant, hungry for one more touch, for just one more _second_ of her flesh against his own—

All external noise comes rushing back into his ears, a vacuum in reverse. He hears the clomping footsteps and muffled voices of Stormtroopers passing by an open doorway. He’s back in the sterile, metallic coldness of the Star Destroyer. Alone. Just as before. Except this time, all his thoughts are quieted.

All thoughts, but for one.

He knows what he has to do.

**Author's Note:**

> I own none of these characters, _obviously_.
> 
> The quote is from an episode of Mad Men entitled, "The Wheel". It always stuck with me and I found it very fitting here. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed my first attempt at a Reylo fic (or any fic, really, since like, 2006... don't ask what and where, because I won't tell you and you don't want to know). 
> 
> [Come find me on tumblr](https://delia-pavorum.tumblr.com)! (You can be my 20th follower...score)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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